Saturday, August 29 - Sarah Browning reads from her new book, Call Me Yes, from The Word Works, followed by a brief open-mic, generative writing session, and co-sharing space. For paid subscribers only.
Thursdays, Aug 27, 4-6 pm, PST, Join Jon Pearson’s FREE ABRACADABRA SAMPLE WORKSHOP. (Then email Jon for more details about his 6-week workshop at jonstuartpearson@gmail.com.)
September 5, 9 - 11 am, PST : Get More Published (And Have More Fun) with The Poetry Salon and Chill Subs!
Monday, September 7, 2pm, PST/ 5 pm, EST. Less is More: What to Cut, What to Keep with Tresha Faye Haefner, a FREE workshop.
Stay Weird
Make this corner of your world
as weird as you want it
geek out in every way
your quirky heart desires
be a fan
be a stan
value expression
embrace obsession
remember that a doctor
is just a body nerd
and a rock star
is just a music dork
there is no point hiding
all the ways you are unique
because every single one of us
is a gorgeous little freak
-David Gate
Childless
A stranger’s pregnant belly
plops over elastic-waisted jeans,
and a wish kicks its legs
inside me. I wish it
would sit still.
Forest fires blaze
through Quebec, orange
smoke obscuring the sky
of the mid-Atlantic,
ushering in the new
normal: Tyger Tyger,
burning bright,
burning brush
and rushing through
subdivisions, making
ash out of loved lives.
Is delivering a child
into the smoldering of
the Anthropocene
an act of selfishness
or hope? Still, I want
to feel my breasts
milk-heavy,
like little wine bags.
When I hold
my friend’s tender
newborn, I pretend
she is my own—
journey out of her nursery
into the secret life
where I am a mother,
where the little spittle
on my shoulder
is my daughter’s
spittle, and therefore
made lovely. Her tiny fists
yank my loose hair
and pull me back
into the room
where I coo
and cuddle her
as her big eyes search
my face, saying nothing
of the coming dark.
- Stevie Edwards, originally published in Raising the Fifth
HOW TO KISS A WOMAN
First, go out and buy yourself a box of matches, stove lighting matches, the long wooden ones. You got that, pal? ‘Cuz someday you gonna have to learn the fine art of listening. So, you got your matches. Now get yourself a pitcher of milk, a can of worms, and a map of South America. Just do it. You come here for advice and I’m givin’ it to you. First damn thing is to learn to follow directions. What kind of kisser you think you can be without you can follow directions. Now, get yourself two sawhorses and a tank of live lobsters and set that up in the backyard. Of course near an outlet so you can plug in the tank and keep the water warm. Good. Now stick up a couple of liquor stores to get the juices flowing. Leave the money on the way out, no need to be an asshole. Take off your shoes, put them under your bed and walk barefoot to Algernon, Mississippi. It’s a small town, lovely little smells, nice people. Get a root beer float at Kathy’s next to the Laundromat. Then shut up. Get very quiet and start feeling southward from the corners of your mouth. Stop for once being a damn man and start feeling something from the corners of your mouth. Run your tongue over your lips and laps back into childhood. Make it up. Pour the milk over yourself, not for real, light yourself on fire and start feeling all lobster-like.
Jon Pearson
Published in FRE&D
Spring 2015
What the Salt Meant
“That night when the angels came to Lot [his wife was] going to all her neighbors and saying to them, give me salt, because we have guests…Therefore ‘she became a pillar of salt.’” —Bereshit Rabbah 51:5
Her sin, after all, was not
that her rheumy eyes traveled back,
swollen with hope that her daughters’
singed shadows might rise from the blaze
of collapsing skyline. It was that Lot’s wife
warned her neighbors. She would become
the woman who watched the whip burn
across another’s back, then spread
the word one dark night to slip
inside the barn, hide breathless
beneath the hay while the slave catchers
followed a false scent. The woman
who witnessed yellow stars
sewn on neighbors’ jackets,
and went to borrow a cup of sugar,
perhaps a bit of salt, whispering
what she had heard in town about
the coming cattle cars. The woman
who type government reports
no one imagined
she understood, then waited
near the factory gate at closing time,
la migra viene, don’t go
to work tomorrow. It wasn’t
what she chose to face
that raised the angel’s outrage,
fearing the flames would heat
her mind and melt
her heart. What the salt meant
to silence was her voice.
Joanne Durham
Songs rise easily in me now
there’s nothing to temper me:
down the highway, road songs
there and back, love songs,
song a hurting with past lovers,
an old ache for us both.
But song wants to be glory –
you and I, we deserve its joyous
clamor – everyone does.
The world begs for it. Love,
you sing to me at bedtime,
you sing to me when I wake.
Hurt flies from my closed
throat, the clench loosens,
and we are singing, you and I,
the past past at last. Love,
bring me your astonished
self, your song-full always.
I think of a song for you even
now, sitting on the stoop
of my new home, you still
sleeping in my bed, summer
bounty you brought me warm
on the counter just inside the door:
Oh squash, oh corn. Red, red tomatoes.
**
Light over the church’s peaked roof:
I think of you.
Waking for the first time in five days
without your hands on me
and it’s a headache morning: you.
Telling myself it’s been less than a week:
you. Sitting in a packed poetry reading
in my new city and I’m the only person
making noise, snapping, I think of:
you, calling out at the Blues jam, clapping
hard. We are noisy. We are large.
Headache praise. Hands praise.
We are gratitude, all over
our magnificent, ruined bodies.
**
Sunday morning and the drums begin
at the church across the way. Cool air
pours into my new home. You are
asleep across town. I rose early, have
been up already for hours. My talents
I’ve turned toward love. Unfamiliar
heart, long tucked away, I’ve taken
out of its tissue paper wrapping. I’ve
taken everything – your body as a token
for the future. Even as the traffic
picks up on my cross-town street
and the church drums quiet for now,
finished with practice,
pausing before praise.
**
We’ve turned to the practical –
before the long drive you take
my car to your mechanics who
give it a once over. You buy me screws,
even down to brass tacks for the hook
in the shape of a stag where I want
to hang the extra set of keys. Keys
we seem to have found to each other’s
locked door of ache.
Wanting. Eyes’ desire, eyes’ please.
I am heart-ened now I please you,
now I take you in my teeth and gnaw,
take you hard against my waiting.
I have been waiting. I have been at once
alive to maybe and thick-skinned to no.
No ate at me, threatened the possible sky.
But now, call me yes. Call me a stone,
turning in the polishing tide.
- Sarah Browning, originally published in Elysium Review
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